Sunday, August 19, 2012

I recently came upon an article in about.com by N.S.
Gill, their feature writer on ancient history. Its title is 69 Ancient People
You Should Know, and it got me thinking about the most important people of
antiquity – those who would be voted into an Ancients Hall of Fame.

For the purposes of exploring this subject I’m going to
start with Gill’s list, which is as good a place as any. I don’t agree with
many of her selections but I also admit that building a list like this is
subjective. I don’t know if “people you should know” is equivalent to “most
important’ but the latter is the direction I’m taking. I believe fame plays a
significant role here, making it difficult to include those who are generally
unknown to the public in general and me in particular. My sense of antiquity is
that individuals whose fame has endured over the millennia were the most
important. The only qualifier I put on that is that I’m avoiding the infamous whose misdeeds are their claim
to fame.

To return again to the baseball analogy, there are a group
of ancients that I will label first ballot hall of famers. That is individuals
who would be on everyone’s list and would never have their selection questioned.
That list includes,

Do we
add more and by what criteria? A structured approach would dictate selection by
category of accomplishment. For example, the Greeks made significant
contributions in philosophy, science, drama, and poetry, so we should choose
one or more from each of these. Right? But, when you build a list like this and
make any attempt to limit its size, you get into trouble quickly.

It is
generally thought that the four greatest dramatists of all time were Shakespeare,
Aristophanes, Aeschylus, and Euripides. If all three Greeks are in a class with
the Bard, aren’t they all hall of famers?

Philosophy
is tougher still. You start with Plato and Aristotle and then it makes sense to
add Socrates and Thales. Who else? There are so many candidates – Zeno,
Epicurus, Anaximander, Heraclitus, etc.

There are three groups from Gill I have not added: those too
obscure to be eligible, those who didn’t quite make the grade, and those who
are unworthy. In the first group I include Ashkoka (Indian emperor of the
Maurya Dynasty), Hashesput (fifth Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt),
Inhotep (a Polymath circa 2650 B.C.), and Sargon the Great (Akkadian king of
2300 B.C.).

The second group contains Agrippa (important as Augustus
right hand man) but not quite good enough, Thermistocles (admiral of the
Athenian Navy), Anaximander, Anaximenes,
and Tacitus. The unworthy contingent includes Nero, Domitian, and Caligula. Not
sure why they were chosen.

Now let’s move on to the people who are missing from Gill’s
list and are worthy. There are seven in this group: Trajan, Marcus
Aurelius, Livy, Leonidas, Lysander, Isocrates, and Cicero. The Golden Age of
the empire is an important period and Trajan and Marcus are its bookends.
Trajan reigned from 98-117 A.D, stabilizing the empire and initiating a period
of calm lasting 82 years. Marcus Aurelius was the last of the dynasty and is
important for his reflective personality and stoic philosophy. It was a sad
irony that Marcus hated wars and yet was fated to fight in them for almost his
entire reign.

If you have Herodotus and Thucydides on the list you have to
have Livy -- Rome’s greatest historian. We are all the poorer because so many
of his books were lost.

In my view, you can’t construct an Ancient’s Hall of Fame without
Spartans, so I have included two: Leonidas and Lysander. Leonidas is famous for
one single event, his defense at Thermopylae. That story has resonated around
the world ever since as an example of courage, honor, and devotion to the
cause. Leonidas has a unique place on the list because his contribution
occurred during a single event that cost him his life, rather than
contributions over a lifetime. Lysander was Sparta’s greatest admiral, largely
responsible for ending the Peloponnesean War in Sparta’s favor.

I thought of including Lycurgus, architect of the Spartan
political system, but we’re not sure a single person with that name existed.

I include Isocrates, at risk, because some would call him
obscure. He labored under the shadow of Plato but his contribution to the
development of educational systems that followed him is unequalled. He was
Athens’ greatest orator and had a great influence over the politics of is day.

So now we reach the end with Cicero, who as a philosopher,
orator, statesman, lawyer, and political theorist had a significant impact on late
Republican Rome. Cicero’s Latin prose was unequalled as he built a Latin
philosophical vocabulary by translating the Greek. His letters, when discovered
during the 14th century, helped launch the renaissance, through
interest created in the writings of antiquity. Cicero’s humanist philosophy
influenced the renaissance, while his republicanism influenced the founders of
the United States.

Now we have a complete list of 53 – an odd number and no
more than an arbitrary stopping point based on subjective criteria. Still it’s
fun to debate the greatest of antiquity. Wish we had a few like them today but unfortunately,
in this modern age, image and money have subverted wisdom and knowledge.

6 comments:

Recently I read a book by Dan Brown "The Lost Symbol". It was very interesting and I came to know many things about ancient mysteries. This article has thrown more light on ancient mysteries. Thanks for an interesting article!!